James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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or by email:gurneyjourney (at) gmail.comSorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.

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The show is called “Hard Times: An Artists’ View” (at the Salmagundi Club in New York through August 20). The subjects are homeless people, manual laborers, and street vendors.

Warren Chang’s “Fall Tilling” shows field workers toiling with hoes. A woman sits on the ground, while a man talks on his cellphone.

The fourteen artists in the group show include such veteran realists as Harvey Dinnerstein, Burton Silverman, and Max Ginsberg. According to a caption, they “weathered the drought imposed by the modern abstract art establishment.”

The paintings steer clear of overt narrative, sentimental pity, or political diatribe. Unfortunately, some images look like professional models impersonating down-and-outers. And some rely a bit too heavily on photographs.

The most convincing is a street scene with African-American young people painted by Garin Baker. Mr. Baker knows the neighborhood well, because he has worked for years on the street, developed a mural program with underprivileged artists in Newburgh, NY.

Marvin Franklin (1952-2007) painted authoritative watercolors of subway riders. Franklin taught at the Art Students League, working night shifts as a track cleaner on the subway, where he was killed in a freak train accident.

The show presents a brave direction to young realist painters, something meaningful to express with their skills. It stand squarely in the nineteenth-century realist tradition of Bastien-Lepage, Kramskoi (above: "Portrait of a Peasant"), and Dagnan-Bouveret, as well as the better-known Courbet, Millet, and Van Gogh.

The images are disquieting, reminding us of the hardships faced by the bottom margin of our society. Art can make us look at things we’d normally look away from. Such subjects are not easy choices for a career-minded painter. They are often made at the expense of an automatic sale.

Tonight there will be a lecture and panel discussion at the Salmagundi Club, including Fred Ross, Vern G. Swanson, Peter Trippi, Harvey Dinnerstein, and Burton Silverman.

I imagine that people with enough money to buy art would not want a homeless person on the wall of their living room. I commend these artists for taking the risk and telling these stories. Thanks for the review, James!

I read your review at the same time I noticed that a spsnish comic artist recovered his life after 15 years as hobo, publishing a biographic novel.Really interesting for the subjects and painters, recovering the tradition of artists as chroniclers of their times...

Finnian Beazlie's remark makes me think of something.I invented two qualifications that define how sellable a work of art is.

The first one is the wallpaper index. How well does the work fit on any wallpaper? Typically, a landscape has a high wallpaper factor. It fits in any living-room.An abstract painting with screaming colors probably will not fit on most wallpapers. However, such screaming colors may fit well in a modern living room with white painted walls.So the wallpaper index is actual a line-index, going from classical wallpaper to modern painted walls.The extremes of the line are good. Somewhere in the middle is bad.

The second index is the office index.It defines how likely it is that you will see such a work behind and above the desk of a CEO. This index focuses on the content of the work rather than the colors or decorative aspects.

If we take the sample works of the exhibition that we see in this topic, it's clear that they fail for both indexes.The colors neither scream, nor are they explicitely gentile. These works will neither fit in a classical wall or on a hypermodern wall.

For the second index, the office index. No CEO will want a portrait of a homeless person behind his desk.

So these paintings fail big time for both the decorative (wallpaper) index, as well as for the content (office) index.

To the comments about the "sellability", people who buy art have all different tastes and sensibilities. The absolute worst thing that an artist can do (in my opinion, from the point of view of keeping your soul and self-respect intact) is second guess their buyers and plan for the most potential sales when finding their vision. Some very powerful, influential, and valued paintings in art history are those that challenged their audience and took big risks.

James, FYI, you might want to clear up to the folks at TAD that these are not your paintings (for some reason they're being used in an announcement about you teaching with them)